Saturday, April 21, 2012

Residents of a Chicago condo whose building will be in the eye of the
NATO storm are being warned that they should move out for the weekend
... or risk being trapped inside by rioters.

FOX Chicago News was
first to report Friday that the people living in the 17-floor Library
Tower building at 520 South State Street were warned in a letter from
condo management that "we are STRONGLY recommending that all residents find places to stay during the conference from May 18 through May 21."

Nearly four million more people have left the Golden State in the
last two decades than have come from other states. This is a sharp
reversal from the 1980s, when 100,000 more Americans were settling in
California each year than were leaving. According to Mr. Kotkin, most of
those leaving are between the ages of 5 and 14 or 34 to 45. In other
words, young families.

The scruffy-looking urban studies
professor at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., has been studying and
writing on demographic and geographic trends for 30 years. Part of
California's dysfunction, he says, stems from state and local government
restrictions on development. These policies have artificially limited
housing supply and put a premium on real estate in coastal regions.

"Basically, if you don't own a piece
of Facebook or Google and you haven't robbed a bank and don't have rich
parents, then your chances of being able to buy a house or raise a
family in the Bay Area or in most of coastal California is pretty weak,"
says Mr. Kotkin.

While many middle-class families have
moved inland, those regions don't have the same allure or amenities as
the coast. People might as well move to Nevada or Texas, where housing
and everything else is cheaper and there's no income tax.

And things will only get worse in the
coming years as Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown and his green cadre
implement their "smart growth" plans to cram the proletariat into
high-density housing. "What I find reprehensible beyond belief is that
the people pushing [high-density housing] themselves live in
single-family homes and often drive very fancy cars, but want everyone
else to live like my grandmother did in Brownsville in Brooklyn in the
1920s," Mr. Kotkin declares.

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Last year, almost 1,800 people followed Superman's lead, renouncing their U.S. citizenship or handing in their Green Cards. That's a record number since the Internal Revenue Service began publishing a list of those who renounced in 1998. It's also almost eight times more than the number of citizens who renounced in 2008, and more than the total for 2007, 2008 and 2009 combined.

But not everyone's motivations are as lofty as Superman's. Many say they parted ways with America for tax reasons.

The United States is one of the only countries to tax its citizens on income earned while they're living abroad. And just as Americans stateside must file tax returns each April - this year, the deadline is Tuesday - an estimated 6.3 million U.S. citizens living abroad brace for what they describe as an even tougher process of reporting their income and foreign accounts to the IRS. For them, the deadline is June.

The National Taxpayer Advocate's Office, part of the IRS, released a report in December that details the difficulties of filing taxes from overseas. It cites heavy paperwork, a lack of online filing options and a dearth of local and foreign-language resources.